Transcription
Here are 10 mistakes I've learned to avoid while designing a custom home.
Hi, I'm Chris Novelli with N3 Architecture, and I just designed a lot of custom homes. Not everyone has the same requirements, not everyone has the same goals, but there are things that happen on every project that should be considered and avoided.
There are things that I make sure happen on every project, and then there are things that I make sure don't happen on every project. Here are some of the things I like to avoid. Of course, this is not the be-all-end-all list, which could be a hundred points long, maybe even longer, but here are 10 things that I like to avoid during a custom home project.
Number one, we're coming in hot with this one, and that is locating a bathroom or a powder room near the entry to your home, or near the kitchen, or near the dining room, or off the living room, or anywhere that can be seen by your family and guests.
Let's just face it, things happen in a bathroom. There are smells, there are noises. Hey, listen, we are all human; we get it. Things happen in the bathroom. But when you have people coming over to your home and walking through your front door, and you're greeting them, do you want those sounds and smells to be happening right next to the front door?
Or if you have people over for a dinner party and they're eating in the dining room, or you have a party and a gathering, and of course, everyone likes to hang out in the kitchen, do you want your toilet room or your powder room to have a door that opens off the kitchen or the dining room where people can see in and hear stuff like that?
That's uncomfortable for you, that's uncomfortable for the guests, and that's uncomfortable for the person who's using the bathroom. So please, don't locate a powder room or a half bathroom near the front door, near the kitchen, or off the living room.
I like to tuck my powder room sort of around the corner. If you can imagine walking in the front door, you might have a closet and a little vestibule or foyer area. Then you can continue one way to the main part of the house that has the kitchen, dining room, etc.
Then maybe you can envision taking a left and going down a little corridor where you will have a mudroom, a laundry room, and then your half bathroom down there. It's down a little hallway that way; it's private. No one hears it, no one smells it, and everyone's happy.
Number two, and this is really popular with house plans that you see online or plans that were created by a builder or a developer or someone that's not actually trained in architecture, and that is having your house too wide or too deep.
Now, I'm not talking about length; it can be as long as it wants. I'm talking about the sort of front-to-back depth of it. Realistically, once you get over 20 or 25 feet wide, the sunlight and the daylight are not actually going to make it all the way into the space.
I see these houses that are sort of stacked up, maybe two or three rooms wide, pushing that 35 or 40-foot width from front to back. A lot of times, those houses end up with spaces that are really dark, and they don't have that daylight and lightness to them because it's too far. The sun does not penetrate into the house as far as that goes.
Unless your site is compact and there's no other way, if you limit your width to 20 to 25 feet, you're going to have a nice, bright, warm house.
Number three is not thinking about the views. I'm not necessarily talking about an ocean view or a mountain view or a view out to the lake because, let's just face it, if you're lucky enough to have an ocean view or a mountain view or a lake view or something similar, then congrats to you; that's amazing.
But most people don't have that. What I'm talking about are specific curated views where you use the architecture of the house to frame views from one place to another. It can lead you in your procession into the space; it can highlight certain areas.
One example of how I like to do this is when you come in the front door. I don't like entering the front door and looking at a wall or looking at a closet or even looking at the entry to another room. What I like to do is, when you open the front door, the main entry of the room, I like there to be some sort of short space that's not too deep that has windows looking out either into a backyard or a courtyard or something.
Something that visually extends through the house just makes for a much better first impression when you walk in the door. Other places to think about this are hallways. If you have a hallway, you don't want to necessarily just have it end at a door or end at a wall where you can go left to right.
A hallway is a nice opportunity where, at the end, if there was a window that frames a certain view, it again provides daylight and leads your eye out of the house and into the surrounding environment. Framing those views is so important in the way a house feels and flows, so definitely think of that. Just don't have these dead-end view corridors; you want your eye to be extended through a space.
All right, number four: complicated roof forms. I went over this in a previous video from a few weeks ago when I was talking about ice dams. When you get these complicated roof forms, they're harder to construct, they're harder to insulate, they're harder to weatherproof, they're harder to vent, and they just don't look good; they look like a jumbled mess.
So again, keep your roof form very simple. That doesn't mean that you can't have one roof intersecting into another, or that doesn't mean that you can't have some dormers if it's applicable to the style of the house and the function of the house and what you're trying to accomplish.
But having roofs that are just a gigantic jumbled mess is going to make it harder for your builder, you're going to pay more for it, it's not going to look as good, and guess what? It's not going to perform as well either. So avoid having complicated roof forms.
Number five: not designing for the sun and for the daylight. This gets into tip number two, where I told you not to make the house too wide. But tip number five, when you're laying out the orientation of your house and where the rooms occur in the house and on your site in general, you really need to consider the orientation of the sun both during the summer and the winter and everywhere in between.
You need to consider what rooms you want the daylight in at what times. I give an example to my clients of a past client that has people over to watch football every Sunday during the football season. They have a big party; it's part of their lifestyle, it's part of what they enjoy doing.
The way that they originally thought the living room would lay out would put the sunlight in a direct glare onto where they want to have their TV, and it would ruin the football-watching experience. Either you'd have to close the blinds and shades, and then the room is dark, or you'd have this massive glare on the TV.
So thinking about what rooms you want the sun to hit at what times of the day, and then you design your house around that. Not only that, but think about the solar angles. What's the angle of the sun during the summer versus the angle of the sun during the winter?
How can you use your roof overhangs or any other projection to either allow that winter sun in and warm up the house, or to block the summer sun and have the house be cooler during the summer? Those are things that you really need to consider: designing around the sun and designing around the daylight, where you want that light to go at what times, and how to better position or use architectural elements to either allow the sun in or to block it out.
Tip number six is not thinking about the storage that you actually need. A lot of people say that they want storage; everyone wants storage. You want closets here and storage rooms there and closets everywhere.
When we talk about storage, people almost immediately start to think about a big walk-in closet in their primary bedroom. But what they don't often think about is where they're going to store their food and their canned goods. I mean, pantries have become a lot more popular these days.
Also, people don't often consider where they're going to put their vacuum cleaner, where they're going to put their mops and brooms. These are all things that you need to think about because you don't want to jam them into the coat closet at the front entry, which is what a lot of people do.
You want to have at least some spot that's sort of dedicated for that sort of storage.
Number seven: not thinking about acoustics. This has become a bigger problem in recent years, and by recent years, I mean like 10 to 15, because that's recent in the architectural world by the length of time it takes to get a project done.
In recent years, I'm seeing these large open vaulted spaces with hard surface walls, hard surface ceilings, and hard surface floors, whether it's tile or wood or laminate. The only sort of soft surfaces to absorb sound are your furniture or your draperies or whatever.
This is also a big problem when you have these double-height spaces with vaulted ceilings and then a loft area for the kids to play. Well, guess what? The noise that the kids are producing up there in that loft is going to make your enjoyment of your living room not as nice.
Even if you don't have an open loft area, just having a large space with all hard surfaces and not thinking about the acoustic quality of those surfaces can lead to a very unpleasant room, a very unpleasant living experience, maybe even some stress if loud echoing noises affect you that way.
It happens. I was just at a house a couple of weeks ago where it's a new construction house, and I was visiting. It was very loud, very open, all hard surfaces, and it was a really unpleasant place to be in.
Of course, people ask me, "Oh Chris, what do you think about this new house?" and I have to sort of lie and say, "You know, it's great," but in reality, it's pretty awful. So if you want these big open spaces and vaulted spaces, just think about the acoustics a little bit. Maybe talk to your architect about the acoustic qualities or even hire a professional to help you so that you don't end up with a space that is unenjoyable.
Okay, number eight: this is a big one for me, especially because I have so much experience in multi-family housing, senior housing, and affordable multi-family housing. That is thinking about or not thinking about how furniture is actually going to be moved into and out of a space.
Oftentimes, I see hallways and corridors that are too narrow, doors that are too narrow, stairs that are too narrow, or stairs that are U-shaped or have a turn in them. That doesn't mean that you can't use that type of stair; you just need to give a little extra space so you can actually bring a bedroom setup or a living room setup.
A lot of times, I like to have straight staircases whenever possible because, let's just face it, it's easier to bring a couch or a bed or a mattress up a straight stair than it is a stair with a turn. But even a straight stair doesn't always solve the solution.
How many times have you seen a house or an apartment where you have a stair come down to a little three or four by four landing that requires a turn just to go up that straight stair? Then you have a half wall or a railing that's blocking you, and you're trying to move a mattress up there; it's just not going to work.
A good way to avoid that is to line up your doorways with your stairs and your hallways. That could be maybe it's an entry door where you come in and go right up the stair, or maybe at the top of the stair, the door to a bedroom is right straight there so you can at least go into that bedroom and then pivot and come out the other way.
Again, it's not just limited to stairs; stairs are a big one, but any place that you have to bring furniture and turn around a wall or an object in your house. And again, the width of the door: don't make your doors too narrow just to save a couple bucks.
Great, you save 20 bucks on the door going with a 32-inch door rather than a 34 or 36, but guess what? Now you can't move your heirloom armoire that your great-grandfather passed down to you into your bedroom because the doorway is too small. So great job on saving those 200 bucks.
Number nine is not giving enough priority to a kitchen pantry or a back-of-the-house kitchen. I talked about this a little bit when we were talking about storage, but I want to talk to you about the importance of having a pantry.
This is not so much of a hard sell anymore because, in recent years, pantries and sort of back-of-house kitchens have become more and more popular in custom homes. But think about not only where you're going to store your food but also all the clutter that's on your countertops from all your appliances: your coffee makers, your toasters, your bread box, and this appliance and that appliance.
You just have your countertop taken up with all this stuff, and I haven't yet to meet a person who loves clutter. So design a space. If you're building a custom home, chances are you have the opportunity to design a space that can accommodate those things, and you can put them away.
If you're working on a renovation or addition project, maybe you don't have that opportunity because you're limited by the space that you have. But even then, there are pantry cabinets that you can use, and there are appliance cabinets where the appliance can still sit on the countertop, but it has a door that comes down. It looks just like a normal cabinet door and keeps those appliances and that equipment hidden from you. It just makes for a better place.
And number 10, finishing off with a big one here, one that is near and dear to my heart, one that I talk to every client about, one that you've probably heard me say before, especially if you follow me on other platforms. If you haven't heard me say it before, you're going to hear me say it a thousand times after today, and that is prioritizing finished materials over the performance of your house.
Listen, I get it; everyone wants a beautiful kitchen with stone countertops and tile backsplashes. They want this great finished flooring, and they want this amazing trim work and all that stuff. I understand how important that is to people and how important it is for the perception.
The perception that you've spent all this money, and you sort of want to show it off to your friends and family and say, "Hey, look at my kitchen that I just designed! Look at this house that I just built with the beautiful kitchen or those beautiful bathroom fixtures!" I get it.
No one wants to spend a ton of money building a custom home and then walk in day one to show their friends and family, and there's a plastic laminate countertop. Nobody wants that, right? But if you have a fixed budget, you have to prioritize what is most important, what is least important, and what is on that middle ground.
But I also want you to think about what can be replaced later on down the line. You might only get one chance to build up your envelope of your house correctly. You might only get one chance to insulate properly and make sure that everything is air sealed.
You might only get one chance to install your siding over a vented rain screen so that the back of your siding can dry and it doesn't create mold within your wall or allow water to drain out like it would in a rain screen system.
You might only get one chance to install the European windows that have a much better performance quality than American windows. You might only get one chance to do that stuff, but you can always replace a countertop; you can always replace floors.
So please just understand, I know it's important to you. I know those finished materials are important, and they're important to me too. They're very important to me too, but there are things that are more important.
What it comes down to is your comfort, and the better performing envelope will result in you being more comfortable within your home.